Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World's Holy Dead

Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World's Holy Dead
ISBN-10
1429936657
ISBN-13
9781429936651
Series
Rag and Bone
Category
Social Science
Pages
136
Language
English
Published
2009-03-31
Publisher
Macmillan
Author
Peter Manseau

Description

A fascinating, intelligent, and sometimes funny tour of the human relics at the root of the world’s major religions By examining relics—the bits and pieces of long-dead saints at the heart of nearly all religious traditions—Peter Manseau delivers a book about life, and about faith and how it is sustained. The result of wide travel and the author’s own deep curiosity, filled with true tales of the living and dubious legends of the dead, Rag and Bone tells of a California seeker who ended up in a Jerusalem convent because of a nun’s disembodied hand; a French forensics expert who travels on the metro with the rib of a saint; two young brothers who collect tickets at a Syrian mosque, studying English beside a hair from the Prophet Muhammad’s beard; and many other stories, myths, and peculiar histories. With these, and an array of other digits, limbs, and bones, Manseau provides a respectful, witty, informed, inquisitive, thoughtful, and fascinating look into the "primordial strangeness that is at the heart of belief," and the place where the abstractions of faith meet the realities of physical objects, of rags and bones.

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